


words & wires & other ways to build new worlds

by freudiancascade



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Don't @ Me, F/F, canon made things super sad and i Leaned Into It A Bit, look -- i didn't technically kill any lesbians, maybe i just have feelings about brilliant ladies looking at the sky and searching for answers, ok maybe i Leaned Into It A Lot, reaching ever and always so far beyond their grasp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 09:04:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15927212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freudiancascade/pseuds/freudiancascade
Summary: "Maureen Miller is enraptured with every ounce of potential that her imagination can capture and pin, butterfly-like, down into theories and hypotheses. Somehow, despite this, she has not allowed that vast sea of possibility to make her cold or unkind.Lucretia thinks, in another world, she might have loved that boundless sense of wonder."





	words & wires & other ways to build new worlds

**Author's Note:**

> @intrikate88 said a thing and put me in a hell spiral again. So, my thanks to her, and thanks to @wingedflight for the beta!
> 
> We're fine. Everything's okay here. Spoilers for all of Stolen Century, especially That Thing Lucretia Did That Was Undoubtedly Well-Intentioned But Also Very Problematic At Best.

—x—

_      When she learns that Maureen Miller is dead, Lucretia locks herself in her office for two solid days. Around her, the literal and figurative machinery of the Bureau they built together hums and buzzes and whirrs, whipping itself into order despite (perhaps because of) her absence. The moon base floats a determined ellipse through the sky; the engines and motors still hold their course steady against the darkness of the space beyond. Lucretia thinks a lot about that, and about a great many other things. She takes no food nor drink, and does not sleep, and writes only scattered fragments on scraps of parchment. It feels fitting, somehow, for her words and their conveyance to be frustratingly incomplete. _

_    When she emerges, she is calm. She orders a basket of flowers sent in condolence to Lucas. She waves off concern. She shows only her usual exhaustion -- no grief -- and she does not ask Lucas how his mother died. Part of her already knows, and already knows this oversight will be a mistake. She also does not feed the voidfish any record of Maureen's life. _

_    This is another mistake, and she knows it all too well, but she also knows that it is the least she can do. _

\--x--

     Lucretia and Maureen lay on their backs in the grass and peer up at the bottomless sky above. Across the clearing, a child with his mother's burning ambition traces patterns in the dirt with the end of a broken twig. At this distance Lucretia can tell that he's designing circuit diagrams, though parsing their purpose is beyond her. The child clumsily sketches out symbols to represent electricity and careful connections; even when forced outside, Lucas Miller hasn’t yet learned how to relax. Lucretia is starting to think he never will.

    "Do you ever think about birds?" Maureen asks her softly, out of the blue. "I mean, like, really think long and hard about them."

    It is springtime in Faerun, and the smell of the damp soil here is familiar now. That is one thing that always amazes Lucretia -- how each world has its own scent of growing. Green is not the single isolated smell she thought it was more than a century ago. She's even starting to get used to it here. This one is very close to the world that was her original home, she thinks, though she isn't certain about this -- even though scent is supposed to be the strongest of memories, a century is an awfully long time to cast her mind backwards. So Lucretia pushes the thoughts from her mind, muses on Maureen's question, and shakes her head no. "I guess I usually don't."

    "I think we've got a bit of a fundamental design problem with them," Maureen admits, a frown creasing her face. "I don't know if it'd be fair to keep them inside a dome in the sky."

    "People raise birds in cages all the time."

    "That's different. You've seen the blueprints for the prototype base -- if we build that and put it in the sky, the birds in the outdoor ecosystem will always be searching for what's out there, beyond it." Maureen gestures with a hand at the sky. She often moves her hands when she talks, and her many bracelets glint around her slender wrists. She wove them herself out of scraps of old technological junk; Lucretia always finds her eyes drawn to their shine, instead of to Maureen's face. "If they can't see the bars, they'll keep looking for the edge of the world."

    Lucretia pulls a face. "They're birds. Brains the size of peas."

    "I don't know, Lucretia -- I just don't think we can build a green area in the laboratory. If we put bars up, the people won't like feeling trapped by them. But if we make the atmospheric dome clear, it won't be fair to the birds. They'll know there's something bigger, and that they can't reach it. Even if they don't understand, isn't that enough?"

    A headache is starting to bloom behind Lucretia's right eye; she ignores it with a practiced determination. "Right. So. We alter the schematics. The lab is just a test before we build a base to support an active staff. Maybe leaving out the quad on the prototype will be fine.”

\--x--

     Maureen is brilliant, but never in the ways that Lucretia expects her to be. Her skills with a welding gun and a keyboard are matched by her proficiency with a scalpel and a syringe, and both are dwarfed by the ocean of compassion that wells deep behind her eyes. While Lucretia is weary, Maureen shines. Where Lucretia is sick to death of the bonds that tie each world together, Maureen does not see the costs when she peers up at the sky. She is a builder and a healer, and she sees the cosmos both beneath her microscope and through her telescope.

     Maureen Miller is enraptured with every ounce of potential that her imagination can capture and pin, butterfly-like, down into theories and hypotheses. Somehow, despite this, she has not allowed that vast sea of possibility to make her cold or unkind.

     Lucretia thinks, in another world, she might have loved that boundless sense of wonder. Instead, it only fills her with a sinking dread. She could tell Maureen so much, answer so many of her questions and open the door to a million more, and yet.

   And yet.

   And yet Lucretia says nothing, and accepts the icy weight in her stomach as the cost of her silence. From the very beginning, Lucretia knows Maureen's reach will always extend past her grasp. She recognizes that trait well enough to know where it leads, and she has lived long enough to know that some doors should never be opened. It will be better this way, Lucretia knows.

   Together, they can save this world. But Lucretia is not quite ready to cast Maureen adrift in everything that exists beyond it, not yet. Part of Lucretia knows that this is for Maureen's own good; a larger, furtive, guilty part knows only that Lucretia couldn't bear losing her, too.

\--x--

   The day the Millers’ laboratory is launched into the sky, they gather a small crew to see it off. 

    Maureen hasn’t slept a full night in weeks, running the last minute angles and trajectories, calculating weights and reaffirming every ounce of equipment and cargo on board. Lucretia helps where she can, though her head has never been entirely one for numbers. Instead she makes coffee, insists upon regular meals, does not allow the rest of Maureen’s life to fall to the wayside. She tries to manage the courtesies she’d never take for herself, finding somehow that it’s easier to push them upon a friend. By all the gods, it’s been so very long since Lucretia last had somebody to care about.

    And then finally all the work is done, and all that’s left to do is launch.

    During the speeches and ceremonies Lucas Miller looks bored, almost deliberately so. He’s old enough now to have decided not to feign interest in anything that doesn’t set his vast imagination alight — it reminds Lucretia of his mother, and she can only hope that age will bring a softening to the callous edge of his ambitions. Can only hope that he, too, inherited that vast well of compassion. When the facility breaks from the earth and begins its slow ascent towards the middle of the sea, he lowers his portable game and allows his eyes to go wide with wonder. The facade of his face cracks open like a crystal, and Lucas Miller is in awe. Lucretia knows he will someday accomplish great things and it causes a swell of pride to bloom in her chest, realizing that she was even a small part of that.

   "Next stop," Maureen says, and her eyes are bright with determination and hope for all three of them together, "the Bureau of Balance.”

\--x--

   Moonlight slips over the garden and Lucretia finds herself clinging to the shadows as she crosses the room on light feet and pins. Maureen, ever the botanist, may have vetoed the quad before her lab was ever built, but then she went ahead and knocked a hole into the roof and found a way to keep green things around her all the same. The plants shimmer silver now from the distant light tangled up in their leaves; a soulwood branch grasps at Lucretia's sleeve as she slips past it and resonates with her hurt.

    Maureen is a crumbled tangle of hair and limbs, snoring quietly into the scarred surface of her potting bench. Beside her, specimens wave and drift, reaching tendrils out to brush softly against her hair, weaving vines into her braids like building a crown. At the sound of footsteps her shoulders tense and then she stirs, drawing herself up with a startled gasp. 

    The soft vines retreat, and Lucretia lifts one hand. Her other fingers trace whorled patterns into the knots of her staff, almost subconsciously. "Just me."

    Maureen relaxes, but only briefly. Lucretia can see the wheels click and spin inside the woman's head, as precise as any of her computers, as Maureen takes stock of the situation. The hour of the visit. The red in Lucretia's eyes. The movement against the staff. The Director stills her hand, but knows already it's too late.

    "Who died?" Maureen asks, her eyes large with trepidation.

     Lucretia feels something inside her fall spinning into a thousand pieces, like a centrifuge whirring rapid shards into the walls and chambers of her heart. Can't bring herself to speak.

   Maureen doesn't need her to. Instead she slips from the stool and crosses the distance between them, both arms wrapping around Lucretia effortlessly. "Breathe," she implores, and Lucretia bows her head into the other woman's shoulder and briefly allows herself to fall apart.

    She doesn’t mean to tell Maureen everything. 

    But then “Who died?” is asked again, and Lucretia finds herself answering with the truth. She talks of one friend lost to Raven’s Roost, falling after fighting so hard for his community to rise; another vanishing into the dead of night after an entire town perished from eating out of his hand; a third walking away from his entire family, leaving not even footprints behind him in the sand. How desperately she loves all three of them. How she just wanted, above all else, for them to be safe and happy. How she doesn’t know how it went so wrong.

    “I don’t understand,” Maureen says gently. “Happiness isn’t a broken bone or cut — you can’t just fix it for people.”

    “No, Maureen — I. You don’t understand. You can’t understand, not yet, but — _I_ _did fix it_ ,” Lucretia protests, and then the whole story is spilling out. 

    The Director speaks of a different world, one with two suns, and how it died a century ago. And then she keeps talking. She tells Maureen of a journey and a flight. Of a Hunger. Of seven people, casting themselves against the light, frantically trying to run further than it can reach. She tells Maureen of two twins, all fire and smoke and laughter and their sparkling, cracking, wild magic. Of the man who loved one of them, his gentle heart hardening only enough to learn how to fight this war beside them. Of a fighter, taking endless hits so those he cared so deeply about would be spared from harm, always ready for another round. Of the journals Lucretia herself had written and then destroyed. Of a cleric bringing peace to his congregation when pressed against the end of the world, even as his own faith wavered. And of their captain, bravest of them all, keeping them flocked in formation and always looking one step ahead to give them somewhere safe to land. 

    And she tells Maureen what happened to them all.

    “Flying like birds before the storm,” Maureen whispers at one point, and then falls silent again, listening to all of it. Her hand moves in smooth circles on Lucretia’s back, and her eyes are bright and attentive. Lucretia knows she must be burning with questions, with observations, with that bottomless need to reach  _ further  _ and understand  _ more,  _ but Maureen refrains from interrupting. Lucretia has never before been so grateful to anybody; she feels like she is made of glass, her limbs distant from the thud of her heart, barely attached to her, floating. Her heart is in her throat and, the more words come out, the tighter her windpipe feels.

    Even as Maureen meets her with softness, responding only with a kindness she knows she does not deserve, Lucretia is already certain she’s made an unforgivable mistake.

    When she is done talking, Lucretia pauses for a breath. Her whole body is shaking. In the rising dawn, Maureen is flushed and glowing. The universe is so much bigger in this dawn than in the dusk before; Lucretia wonders where, in a kinder world, this discovery would lead her.

    “Thank you for telling me all of that,” Maureen says and then hesitates briefly before kissing her. It is very gentle. Soft lips, breath catching, holding, a second longer than it should. As though she knows that this, too, can not last. Lucretia realizes with a pang that Maureen knows what is to come, and has accepted it, and has taken that certainty as permission to do what otherwise she’d never dare.

    And so Lucretia kisses her in return, and then draws away. She flees the garden, hand tight around her staff, feeling Maureen’s eyes as they watch her go.

\--x--

    The voidfish sparkles, but does not explode into light. Forgetting a single conversation will not force the galaxy into a new shape; it is a single flare in the dark, a pinpoint in the inky blackness of its belly, and then nothing.

    Lucretia releases her breath.

\--x--

    Afterwards, Maureen Miller still looks to the sky. She peers too far into the cosmos, and she sees too much despite Lucretia’s most desperate attempt to protect her, and she breaks before the flood of it and she dies. It is every bit as awful as Lucretia had feared, and then it is even worse than that, still.

    The Director mourns as long as she can allow, and then she picks herself up and keeps moving. The next time she hears of Maureen, it is with a promise that the dead woman is carrying her son's body away into the dark. It is the new worst thing Lucretia can bring herself to imagine, and so she tries to not think too hard about it.

   There is still a universe to be saved and, after everything, all she can do is dash herself to pieces against the rocks of making it right.

\--x--

     The dead remember what the living have forgotten. A confession and a kiss. A moonlit night in an impossible garden, immediately understood again.

     Seven birds, flying tirelessly from the storm.

     Maureen remembers, and she feels that storm approach once more. Feels the weight that Lucretia carries and reaches out one last time beyond the planes with a warning, with a prophecy, with hope and love and a fervent prayer that Lucretia will not be left to carry the burden of fighting against the Hunger alone.

    In another world her desperate call is heard and it is known, though it will be some time yet before it is understood.

\--x--

_      After the end of a long life lived well, a life of atonements to the dead and building a better world for the living, two women meet again on the Astral Plane. One has always held the universe wide open in front of her; the other, with a multiverse left wearily behind, approaches slowly through the sea of souls. They touch, hesitant at first, and then they embrace and the world lifts brightly into light as they remember each other. _

_    "I was so scared. I’m sorry.” _

_    "I wasn’t scared enough. I’m sorry, too.” _

_    Around them, the ocean rushes on in all directions, as vast and inscrutable as the sky above. They watch it for a long moment. _

_    "Is it really that easy, being forgiven?” Lucretia muses. “I’ve hurt so many people — I don’t deserve —“ _

_    "Maybe sometimes it can be," Maureen interrupts. _

_    "Is this one of those sometimes?” _

_“You deserve the world.”_ _A hand sweeps broadly towards the horizon, brightness dancing at the wrist as it remembers how, in life, wire jewellery spun around her limbs. "There's a whole lot of somewheres out there, Lucretia, and sometimes, too -- Madame Director, I want to hear all about the ones you've seen. I want to hear it from you again, for good this time. And then I want us to take all the time in the world to find the one that we like the best, and stay there for a while."_

_    Eyes that follow that light; a heart that aches to believe it. The point at the edge of the world where sky and sea and souls all blur. It really is something beautiful. _

_    "In that case --" Lucretia begins. She thinks of birds and cages, of stars and the deep, of remembering and of forgetting, and then she grounds herself in the present with a squeeze of Maureen's hand. "In that case, I should warn you: we can't stay too long. I might have promised the Grim Reaper I'd come to Sunday dinner occasionally." _

_    "I've met him, he's a good guy." Maureen laughs, twining her fingers between Lucretia's own. "We have time." _

_    And so, onwards they go. _


End file.
